Dear O'Abby: What do I do if my book is too long?

 Dear O'Abby,

I've been working on my first novel for about five years now, and finally got it to the point where I felt it was ready to show other people.  So I joined a critique group.  They seem like nice people and several of them have published more than one novel, so I'd hoped they would be helpful in getting my book into some kind of shape.

Well, they have, to a degree.  But all of them agree that my 146,000 word novel is too long.  I've already cut it down from over 200,000 words, so I'm not sure what else I need to do.  I feel like if I cut too much more, the book won't make sense.

Can you help?

Best,

Longwinded.

Dear Longwinded,

I'm afraid I'd have to agree with your group.  146,000 words is too long for a debut novel.  Around 100,000 is the upper limit for most adult novels with around 70,000 being standard for YA.  Fantasy can sometimes run a little higher because of the amount of world building required to set up a fantasy world, but if you're getting close to 120,000, you need to take a good hard look at what you've written.

There are a number of ways to start paring word count if you feel like you're too long.  I like to go through each chapter and remove all those pesky filtering words like just, believed, thought, quite, wondered etc.  You can usually cut a good chunk out just by doing this.

You can also search for redundant words and phrases.  Things like "she nodded her head."  I mean, what else would she nod?  And adverbs can often be redundant too.  If someone is walking quietly down the hall, see if you can find a verb that would better describe the action.  Maybe he's creeping down the hall, or shuffling, or tiptoeing.  All of these words convey something more than just moving quietly and can tell the reader something about the character and his intentions as well as describing the action.

Read through every scene and make sure what you're describing is relevant to the story and/or the characters.  If you have a paragraph describing the outside of a house, that house needs to be important.  What it looks like needs to mean something to the character looking at it.  If neither of these things are true, do you need to describe the outside of the house in that much detail?  Sometimes a broad description works just as well if the scenery is not critical to the plot or character.

You can do the same thing with your action scenes.  Are your characters doing mundane things like making tea or drawing a bath?  You can just say that's what they are doing.  You don't need to outline their actions as they do them unless the way they make tea or draw a bath is important to the plot or gives important information about the character.  

Read your dialogue passages closely.  While you want dialogue to sound natural, you can often cut a lot of dialogue out because people say a lot of stuff that doesn't mean anything.  Only keep the things people say that actually mean something.

Basically, every word of your novel needs to count either as something that drives the plot or something that colours your characters.  If you have stuff in there that does neither, it can go.

Hopefully that helps...  Best of luck with your novel!

X O'Abby